The wonders of Zanzibar

FROM my position out on the Zanzibar Channel I can see Stone Town’s entire shoreline at once. There’s Tembo House Hotel, with its carved doors opening on to a terrace lined with walnut trees, and the new Hyatt going up alongside it. The House of Wonders, a former palace that is now home to a museum of Zanzibari history and culture, stands prominently, and I spy Forodhani Gardens, the turret of which keeps watch over the port, where container ships arrive from Dar es Salaam loaded with used cars and bicycles. A blanket of mangroves is anchored to the shore and, peering up behind it all a little incongruously, is the Bank of Tanzania.

“You know, in Zanzibar, every kilometre everything changes,” says dhow skipper Seif Mtumura Idrissa. “We have a small country so we give lots of names: in Maru­hubi you find the mangroves, in Kinazini you find the banks.”

The traditional Zanzibari fishing boat in which we’re rocking about is built from saltwater-cured wood collected from those mangroves, and from teak and mahogany brought in from the Tanzanian mainland and sold in planks and poles along Malawi Road. But there’s a difference between dhows for tourists and dhows for fishermen, Idrissa advises.

“See, this boat has a roof, but those fishing boats over there don’t,” he says.

I look to where he’s pointing: the white sails of two dhows are but faint pencil marks, shadows at the point where sea and sky converge. These fishermen will push onwards to waters invisible to us, where they will drop anchor, sleep for a few hours, cast out their lines at midnight and return at dawn with sardines and other small fish for which Idrissa doesn’t “have the words in English”.

The dhows dissolve into the horizon; other, bigger fishing boats power out from the old fishermen’s port, their sails not yet open to the goading sea breeze.

Unlike the line fishers, these men will throw nets into the salty depths, haul them up and flip the contents into their vessels. They, too, will come home as the sun rises, “pole pole” — slowly, slowly — Idrissa says, their dhows thrashing with white snapper, tuna, barracuda and, if they’ve ventured far enough, shark.

Do these men on their way to a hard night’s work ­notice the sun that is plunging now like a crazed fireball towards the ocean?

Perhaps it’s a sight that becomes pedestrian to people who witness it night after night. Maybe their heads are filled with other things: the families they leave behind in houses crammed into alleyways and marked with symbolic reminders of this island’s slave-trading past; the chai their wives will make on their return, brewed from spices that grow in the plantations, near the crumbling hammam that the first sultan of Zanzibar built in 1832; the empty stalls in Stone Town’s market that have been hosed down and that must be refilled come morning so the islanders don’t go hungry.

Idrissa, though, is alert to nature’s spectacle: he pulls a bottle of wine from beneath a bench and removes a length of kanga — brightly printed Zanzibari cloth — from a ledge to reveal snacks of cassava chips and calamari, peanuts and homemade cheese, and jam made from Zanzibari-grown pineapples, guavas and spices.

People spill out of Stone Town’s alleyways on to the beach, their faces burnished by the setting sun. Children jump from stone walls and from beached boats into the glowing waters of the channel. I lift my glass to the streaked, combusting sky and share in the fishermen’s everyday bounty.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/travel/the-wonders-of-zanzibar/story-e6frg8rf-1227032352623?nk=c82b6db0456b7a82129a03862d2527b5